Resistance heating wire coils of the type, for example, that are used in electric clothes dryers have heretofore been fabricated and handled in various different ways. The resistance heating wire can be manufactured by one company and sold to a customer such as an appliance manufacturer who winds the wire, stretches it into a helical coil and forms eyelet terminals at opposite ends of the coil. This has some advantages because the wire can be shipped from the wire manufacturer to the customer using conventional wire packaging arrangements. It also enables the customer some flexibility in manufacturing coils to suit its demands on a current basis. However, the appliance manufacturer has to store and handle coils as a finished part and this requires some special handling to minimize tangling and nesting of the coils. Tangled or nested coils must be gently untangled to maintain the critical spacing, as manufactured, between adjacent convolutions. Rough handling can permanently distort the coil spacing which in turn will create problems in the finished product, for example, uneven heating in the case of heating coils.
One approach has been to hang the coils in a loop on a rack one at a time and in a fairly organized and untangled arrangement. Hanging long coils by both ends in a loop prevents sagging and permanent distortion. The eyelets at one end are slipped onto a post on the rack and the eyelets at the other end on another post spaced horizontally from the first post. This facilitates storage of the coils and handling thereof as they are removed, usually one at a time, for manufacturing the heating element of an electric clothes dryer or the like. Since this may be a production line operation, it is important that a worker be able to remove the coils efficiently from the rack without repeated interruption to untangle the coils.
It is frequently more economical for the wire manufacturer to fabricate the coils. Hence, a alternative approach is to have the wire manufacturer wind and stretch the wire into the finished coil and form the eyelet terminals. However, the wire manufacturer now has material handling problems to keep the coils from becoming nested and entangled and the customer still has material handling problems particularly for a production line operation.